I have talked this matter over with persons of established reputations in the world for good sense, knowledge, and experience, and with as nice feelings in points of honour and friendship as anybody ever had.  It is their opinion which makes me so confident of my own, exclusive of the arguments themselves, qui sautent aux yeux.

Now, as to the expedients.  The capital sum,(93) let us call it, 15,000.  Let Charles pay immediately 5,000 pounds from the 50,000 pounds.  I will endeavour a year hence to raise you five more.  Let Charles and Lord Stavordale,(94) by their joint securities (and let Lady Holland contribute hers), try to raise the other 5,000, and then this debt is paid; and when the worst comes to the worst, you will lose yourself only the 5,000, which we shall endeavour to get from your own securities and resources.  All this is very practicable with people who are disposed to think of their honour more than of the gratification of their own pleasure.

The Holland family went to Bath yesterday.  I took my leave, and it may be a final one, of them on Monday.  Charles, it is said, will follow them.  What is become of Hare I know not.  If you desire a letter to be shown to Lord Holland,(95) Lady H. must shew it.  I will speak to you, as I promised, without reserve.  I am apt to think that he will comprehend what you say very well.  It is not my judgment only, but I have heard it said, that a great deal of his inattention upon these occasions has been affected, and that if the same money was to be received and not to be paid, our faculties would then improve.  I wish that if he has any left, he would exert them now for the sake of the reputation of his family as well as of his own; or he will add a load of obloquy to that which has been already derived (?) upon him, on account of the means by which this dissipated wealth has been acquired; and by this last act of indifference to the honour of his son he will seem to justify all that abuse with which he has been loaded, and they will be apt to apply, what he does not certainly merit, but will nevertheless carry an air of truth with it, and they will say that—­

“Plundering both his country and his friends,
 It’s thus the Lord of useless thousands ends.”

You see, my dear Lord, with how much confidence I treat you.  I have thought aloud, when I have been speaking to you, which perhaps I ought not to have done, but I cannot help it.  I hope that you will burn my letters, for if they served as testimonies of the warmth of my friendship to you, they might be ill interpreted by others. . . .